The 2025 Women’s WorldTour comes to a close, but Track World Championships is just around the corner. Plus: are time trials a dying discipline in women’s road racing?
Cor Vos
Hello, hello and thank you for reading the Wheel Talk Newsletter. The 2025 season is over with Anna Henderson’s win at the Tour of Guangxi. Soon we will be able to look back on some of the biggest storylines and moments from the season, and what it all means for the future of women’s cycling, but first, let’s revisit the final races in China and Ellen van Dijk’s last elite win at the Chrono des Nations.
First things first: The season ends in China
Last year the Tour of Chongming Island and the Tour of Guangxi were a great final week for Ceratizit-WNT, who won all four race days, but this year the wins were slightly more evenly distributed. Liv AlUla Jayco had the most success, with two stage victories, although the first one was a bit odd.
Georgia Baker and Josie Talbot took their first WorldTour wins during stages 1 and 3 of the Tour of Chongming Island, making it a great week for the Australian team, but Baker’s win was after Kathrin Schweinberger was relegated due to a deviation in her sprint. After the fact the UCI reversed the fine on Schweinberger but the decision was done, the Austrian champ would not be the winner of the stage.
The decision to relegate Schweinberger was late enough in the broadcast that the TNT footage of the end of the race, the only available on YouTube, doesn’t show that she ended up not actually being the victor of the first stage.
The second stage went to stage 1 runner-up Sofie van Rooijen of UAE Team ADQ, and with the win the Dutchwoman also took over the race lead, but it would not be for long. With Elisa Balsamo falling short in the sprints, Lidl-Trek made the third and final stage an aggressive one, throwing their top riders into all the breakaways. Other teams were always present as well, which was how Talbot took her stage victory ahead of Riejanne Markus.
The real winner was third-place finisher Anne Knijnenburg, who had been in an early break and finished third on the stage. The VolkerWessels rider won the overall thanks to bonus seconds, a massive acheivement for the ProTeam.
Lidl-Trek kept the momentum going into the Tour of Guangxi, which saw the race shuffle on each ascent of the short climb on the circuit. After many a split, it was Henderson who managed to get away with Caroline Andersson of Liv AlUla Jayco. Henderson let the Swede lead her into the finale and jumped around her to take her second WorldTour victory of the season, while Andersson settled for second.
Behind the two, Usoa Ostolaza (Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi) sprinted to third from the chase group of six.
With that, the 2025 road season is over. There’s so much to unpack, and for some reason this season has felt extra long, but now we have the whole of the offseason to try to figure out what we all just watched.
Transfer update
Izzy Sharp will leave Lidl-Trek with one year remaining on her contract to join Handsling Alba Development team. The British rider spent the last two seasons with the American WorldTeam, but most of her 2025 year was spent racing national-level races in Belgium. She racked up quite a list of top 10s at those events, in fact she only finished outside the top 10 in Belgium twice since racing Vuelta a Extremadura Femenina in March – her last stage race with the team.
Sharp’s move plays into the wider conversation that has been going on for a few years now about junior riders being pulled straight into the WorldTour, and if that is healthy or not for the rider in question.
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